They must stay here? Manifestly. Several days, probably. And any one of those days a figure, or three figures, kilted in scarlet and bearing axes that had bitten the vertebrae of many a beast might come silently up the long hill... None the less, they must stay. Perhaps they would be thought lost in the swamp, back where she had abandoned the small wooden god which alone of her possessions Leyenda had cherished and carried as long as she might. If they found the god, they would not believe she could have left it and gone, trusting only in her lover. Dal considered this matter and that; and finally Leyenda left him to pluck the birds, whose numerous nests on the ground an among the ruins assured them of plentiful food during their halt. And he, the man, with a little assistance, got atop the cone, from whose vantage point anyone lying on his stomach could see two miles down the hill. He thought of the lame man who guarded their village at night from the anamolous claws of the forest-dwellers.
It was good up there in the sun, which beat indifferently on man and brick and bush. The village they had fled, carrying only an idol and their love, was thickly beset by cypresses, from which little bleached serpents occasionally slid onto a man's shoulders. Here nothing was above him. Under the special tolerance of the sun, all jewels were mirrored in the landscape--emerald and amber in the grass, turquoise in the sky, and all the others in the thick-sown phlox, mounting and bannering the ruin. He lay and watched, and planned their descent into the strange country, and wondered what masks the priests of that land might wear.
During the afternoon Leyenda prepared a trap, whose cunning loops of twisted fibre made Dal feel numb-fingered, and proud of such a clever woman, he expressed his pride; and so they were content until evening caught them. Then as on the previous day, the sun fled and the birds returned all in such a confusion of light and sound that it made them wonder. The sky was brighter than blood on a spear.
On the day following, after she had assisted Dal to his post, Leyenda spent an hour washing her bracelet in the mossy basin. After it had soaked for a while, the encrustations could be gouged from the design. Washing and polishing alternately with dried grass, she eventually was able to make out the picture. It had been hammered in with a small pointed instrument, and showed a figure lying in chains before an altar. She must have found a part of the ceremonial ornaments used by the keepers of the temple; and though all the old gods were discredited, Leyenda was uneasy. He knew her own god, the dog-faced image lying in the swamp two weeks' journey behind, would not like this uncovering of his predecessor. All the ruins, spiritual and temporal, of the old days were held suspect by the tribes, which sometimes wandered through them, but she wanted to keep her bracelet. Without conscious volition, Leyenda wedged her arm into it so tightly that she found it would not come off. She had not intended to do so--but there it was. Dal, fortunately for her peace of mind, thought all evil magic would have long since gone out of the bracelet.
Time passed, and Dal's ankle did not improve. For the first three days his eyes went back again and again to the region which they had left, and all its empty miles were a reassurance that their pursuers had faltered. He soon became so certain of this that he forgot to look eastward but turned instead to the west, where lay that fertile valley unreachably far beneath them, into which they hoped to descend. Increasingly at evening, as the sun grew big and spattered the cliff and the world below with various crimsons, he thought of what might lie in the future. Sometimes Leyenda was with him, but she did not care for the evening sky which so stirred his imagination. In a few short days it became to him as fire is to a chill old man: aided by the woman he would lie atop the mound with ruined wonders beneath him and stare
-- 9 --